The Last Coyote (1995)

by Michael Connelly

  As the bay tapered off into a canal, McKittrick pulled back on the throttle and cut their wake. He waved to a man on the bridge of a giant yacht tied up outside a waterside restaurant. Bosch couldn’t tell if he knew the man or was just being neighborly.

  “Take it on a line even with the lantern on the bridge,” McKittrick said.

  “What?”

  “Take it.”

  McKittrick stepped away from the wheel and into the stern of the boat. Bosch quickly stepped behind the wheel, sighted the red lantern hanging at center point beneath the span of a drawbridge a half mile ahead and adjusted the wheel to bring the boat into line. He looked back and saw McKittrick pull a plastic bag of small dead fish out of a compartment in the deck.

  “Let’s see who we’ve got here today,” he said.

  He went to the side of the boat and leaned well over the gunwale. Bosch saw him start slapping an open palm on the side of the boat. McKittrick then stood up, surveyed the water for about ten seconds and repeated the banging.

  “What’s going on?” Bosch asked.

  Just as he said it, a dolphin crested the water off the port stern and reentered no more than five feet from where McKittrick was standing. It was a slippery gray blur and Bosch wasn’t exactly sure at first what had happened. But the dolphin quickly resurfaced next to the boat, its snout out of the water and chattering. It sounded like it was laughing. McKittrick dropped two of the fish into its open mouth.

  “That’s Sergeant, see the scars?”

  Bosch took a quick look back at the bridge to make sure they were still reasonably on line and then stepped back to the stern. The dolphin was still there. McKittrick pointed down into the water beneath its dorsal fin. Bosch could see three white stripes slashed across its smooth gray back.

  “He got too close to a prop one time and it cut him up. The people up at Mote Marine took care of him. But he was left with those sergeant’s stripes.”

  Bosch nodded as McKittrick fed the dolphin again. Without looking up to see if they were off course, McKittrick said, “You better get the wheel.”

  Bosch turned and saw that they had drifted far off line. He went back to the wheel and corrected the course. He stayed there while McKittrick remained in the back, throwing fish to the dolphin, until they passed under the bridge. Bosch decided he could wait him out. Whether it was while they were going out or coming in didn’t matter. He was going to get McKittrick’s story. He was not going to leave without it.

  Ten minutes after the bridge they came to a channel that took them out to the Gulf of Mexico. McKittrick dropped lures from two of the poles into the water and put out about a hundred yards of line on each one. He took the wheel back from Bosch then, yelling into the wind and engine noise.

  “I want to take it out to the reefs. We’ll troll until we’re there and then we’ll do some drift fishing in the shallows. We’ll talk then.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” Bosch yelled back.

  Nothing hit either of the lures, and about two miles from the shore McKittrick killed the engines and told Bosch to bring in one line while he handled the other. It took Bosch, who was left handed, a few moments to get himself coordinated on the right-handed reel but then he started smiling.

  “I don’t think I’ve done this since I was a kid. At McClaren every now and then they’d put us on a bus and take us out to the Malibu Pier.”

  “Jesus, that pier still there?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Must be like fishing in a cesspool by now.”

  “I guess.”

  McKittrick laughed and shook his head.

  “Why do you stay there, Bosch? Doesn’t sound like they particularly want you.”

  Bosch thought a moment before answering. The comment was on point but he wondered if it was on point from McKittrick or whoever the source was he had called.

  “Who’d you call back there about me?”

  “I’m not telling you. That’s why he talked to me, because he knew I wouldn’t tell you.”

  Bosch nodded, signaling he’d let it go.

  “Well, you’re right,” he said. “I don’t think they particularly want me back there. But I don’t know. It’s kind’ve like the more they push one way, the more I push the other. I feel like if they’d stop asking or trying to make me leave, then I’d probably want to do it.”

  “I guess I know what you mean.”

  McKittrick stowed the two rods they had used and set to work outfitting the other two with hooks and buckshot weights.

  “We’re going to use mullet.”

  Bosch nodded. He didn’t know the first thing about it. But he watched McKittrick closely. He thought it might be a good time to start.

  “So you punched out after your twenty in L.A. What’d you do after that?”

  “You’re looking at it. I moved back here—I’m from Palmetto, up the coast, originally. I bought a boat and became a fishing guide. Did that another twenty, retired and now I fish for my own damned self.”

  Bosch smiled.

  “Palmetto? Isn’t that the name of those big cockroaches?”

  “No. Well, yeah, but it’s also the name of a scrub palm. That’s what the town’s named for, not the bug.”

  Bosch nodded and watched as McKittrick opened a bag of mullet strips and hooked pieces on each line. After opening fresh beers, they cast on separate sides of the boat and then sat on the gunwales, waiting.

  “Then how’d you end up in L.A.?” Bosch asked.

  “What was that somebody said about going west young man? Well, after Japan surrendered I passed through L.A. on my way back home and I saw those mountains going all the way up from the sea to the sky…Damn, I ate dinner at the Derby my first night in town. I was going to blow my whole wallet and you know who saw me there in uniform and picked up the tab? Goddamn Clark Gable. I’m not kidding you. I fuckin’ fell in love with that place and it took me almost thirty years to see the light…Mary’s from L.A., you know. Born and raised. She likes it out here fine.”

  He nodded to reassure himself. Bosch waited a few moments and McKittrick was still looking off at distant memories.

  “He was a nice guy.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Clark Gable.”

  Bosch crunched the empty beer can in his hand and got another.

  “So tell me about the case,” he said after popping it. “What happened?”

  “You know what happened if you read the book. It was all in there. It got dumped. One day we had an investigation, the next we were writing ‘No leads at this time.’ It was a joke. That’s why I remember the case so well. They shouldn’t’ve done what they did.”

  “Who’s they?”

  “You know, the big shots.”

  “What did they do?”

  “They took it away from us. And Eno let them. He cut some deal with them himself. Shit.”

  He shook his head bitterly.

  “Jake,” Bosch tried. He got no protest this time over using the first name. “Why don’t you start at the beginning. I need to know everything I can from you.”

  McKittrick was quiet while he reeled in. His bait hadn’t been touched. He recast it, put the rod in one of the gunwale pipes and got another beer. From beneath the console he grabbed a Tampa Bay Lightning cap and put it on. He leaned on the gunwale with his beer and looked at Bosch.

  “Okay, kid, listen, I got nothin’ against your mother. I’m just gonna tell you this the way it fell, okay?”

  “That’s all I want.”

  “You want a hat? You’re gonna get burned.”

  “I’m fine.”

  McKittrick nodded and finally started.

  “Okay, so we got the call out from home. It was a Saturday morning. One of the footbeat guys had found her. She hadn’t been killed in that alley. That much was clear. She’d been dropped off. By the time I got down there from Tujunga, the crime scene investigation was already underway. My partner was there, too. Eno. He was the senior man, he was there
first. He took charge of it.”

  Bosch put his rod in a pipe and went to his jacket.

  “You mind if I take notes?”

  “No, I don’t mind. I guess I’ve been waiting for somebody to care about this one since I walked away from it.”

  “Go ahead. Eno was in charge.”

  “Yeah, he was the man. You’ve got to understand something. We’d been a team maybe three, four months at that time. We weren’t tight. After this one, we’d never be tight. I switched off after about a year. I went in for the transfer. They moved me to Wilshire dicks, homicide table. Never had much to do with him after that. He never had much to do with me.”

  “Okay, what happened with the investigation?”

  “Well, it was like anything else that you’d expect. We were going through the routine. We had a list of her KAs—got it mostly from the vice guys—and were working our way through it.”

  “The known associates, did they include clients? There was no list in the murder book.”

  “I think there were a few clients. And the list didn’t go into the book because Eno said so. Remember, he was the lead.”

  “Okay. Johnny Fox was on the list?”

  “Yeah, he was at the top of it. He was her…uh, manager and—”

  “Her pimp, you mean.”

  McKittrick looked at him.

  “Yeah. That’s what he was. I wasn’t sure what you, uh—”

  “Forget it. Go on.”

  “Yeah, Johnny Fox was on the list. We talked to about everybody who knew her and this guy was described by everybody as one mean guy. He had a history.”

  Bosch thought of Meredith Roman’s report that he had beaten her.

  “We’d heard that she was trying to get away from him. I don’t know, either to go out on her own or maybe go straight. Who knows? We heard—”

  “She wanted to be a straight citizen,” Bosch interrupted. “That way she could get me out of the hall.”

  He felt foolish for saying it, knowing his saying it was not convincing.

  “Yeah, whatever,” McKittrick said. “Point is, Fox was none too happy about that. That put him at the top of our list.”

  “But you couldn’t find him. The chrono says you watched his place.”

  “Yeah. He was our man. We had prints we had taken off the belt—the murder weapon—but we had no comparisons from him. Johnny had been pulled in a few times in the past but never booked. Never printed. So we really needed to bring him in.”

  “What did it tell you, that he’d been picked up but never booked?”

  McKittrick finished his beer, crunched it in his hand and walked the empty over to a large bucket in the corner of the deck and dropped it.

  “To be honest, at the time it didn’t hit me. Now, of course, it’s obvious. He had an angel watching over him.”

  “Who?”

  “Well, on one of the days we were watching Fox’s place, waiting for him to show up, we got a message on the radio to call Arno Conklin. He wanted to talk about the case. ASAP. Now this was a holy shit kind of call. For two reasons. One, Arno was going great guns then. He was running the city’s moral commandos at the time and had a lock on the DA’s office, which was coming open in a year. The other reason was that we’d only had the case a few days and hadn’t come near the DA’s office with anything. So now all of a sudden the most powerful guy in the agency wants to see us. I’m thinking…I don’t really know what I was thinking. I just knew it—hey, you got one!”

  Bosch looked at his pole and saw it bend from a violent jerk on the line. The reel started spinning as the fish pulled against the drag. Bosch grabbed the pole out of the pipe and jerked it back. The hook was set well. He started reeling but the fish had a lot of fight and was pulling out more line than he was reeling in. McKittrick came over and tightened the drag dial, which immediately put a more pronounced bend in the pole.

  “Keep the pole up, keep the pole up,” McKittrick counseled.

  Bosch did as he was told and spent five minutes battling the fish. His arms started to ache. He felt a strain on his lower back. McKittrick put on gloves and when the fish finally surrendered and Bosch had it alongside the boat, he bent over and hooked his fingers into the gills and brought it on board. Bosch saw a shiny blue-black fish that looked beautiful in the sunlight.

  “Wahoo,” McKittrick said.

  “What?”

  McKittrick held the fish up horizontally.

  “Wahoo. Over there in your fancy L.A. restaurants I think they call it Ono. Here, we just call it wahoo. Meat cooks up white as halibut, you wanna keep it?”

  “No, put it back. It’s beautiful.”

  McKittrick roughly pulled the hook from the gulping mouth of the fish and then held the catch out to Bosch.

  “You want to hold it? Must be twelve, thirteen pounds.”

  “Nah, I don’t need to hold it.”

  Bosch stepped closer and ran his finger along the slick skin of the fish. He could almost see himself in the reflection of its scales. He nodded to McKittrick and the fish was thrown back into the water. For several seconds it remained motionless, about two feet below the surface. Post-traumatic stress syndrome, Bosch thought. Finally, the fish seemed to come out of it and darted down into the depths. Bosch put the hook through one of the eyelets on his pole and put the pole back in its pipe. He was done fishing. He got another beer out of the cooler.

  “Hey, you want a sandwich, go ahead,” McKittrick said.

  “No. I’m fine.”

  Bosch wished the fish hadn’t interrupted them.

  “You were saying that you guys got the call from Conklin.”

  “Yeah, Arno. Only I had it wrong. The request for a meeting was only for Claude. Not me. Eno went alone.”

  “Why only Eno?”

  “I never knew and he acted like he didn’t know, either. I just assumed it was because he and Arno had a prior relationship of some kind.”

  “But you don’t know what.”

  “No. Claude Eno was about ten years older than me. He’d been around.”

  “So what happened?”

  “Well, I can’t tell you what happened. I can only tell you what my partner said happened. Understand?”

  He was telling Bosch that he didn’t trust his own partner. Bosch had known that feeling himself at times and nodded that he understood.

  “Go ahead.”

  “He came back from the meeting saying Conklin asked him to lay off Fox because Fox was clear on this case and Fox was working as an informant on one of the commando investigations. He said Fox was important to him and he didn’t want him compromised or roughed up, especially over a crime he didn’t commit.”

  “How was Conklin so sure?”

  “I don’t know. But Eno told me that he told Conklin that assistant DA’s, no matter who they are, didn’t decide whether someone was clear or not for the police, and that we weren’t backing off until we talked to Fox for ourselves. Faced with that, Conklin said he could deliver Fox to be interviewed and fingerprinted. But only if we did it on Conklin’s turf.”

  “Which was…?”

  “His office in the old courthouse. That’s gone now. They built that big square thing right before I left. Horrible-looking thing.”

  “What happened in the office? Were you there for that?”

  “Yeah, I was there but nothing happened. We interviewed him. Fox was there with Conklin, so was the Nazi.”

  “The Nazi?”

  “Conklin’s enforcer, Gordon Mittel.”

  “He was there?”

  “Yup. I guess he was sort of watching out for Conklin while Conklin was watching out for Fox.”

  Bosch showed no surprise.

  “Okay, so what did Fox tell you?”

  “Like I said, not much. At least, that’s how I remember it. He gave us an alibi and the names of the people who could verify it. I took his prints.”

  “What’d he say about the victim?”

  “He said pretty much w
hat we’d already heard from her girlfriend.”

  “Meredith Roman?”